1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to improvements in character generators and more particularly pertains to new and improved method and apparatus for generating binary bit patterns used for the display of alphanumeric characters.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Present technology for alphanumeric character generation is sophisticated and extensive. In spite of all the technology and development in this area, however, the character generators are directed mainly at generating English and European language characters. Relatively few, if any, character generators exist for the generation of Japanese and Chinese characters. Those that do exist provide a very poor visual display of such characters. The reason for this lies, in part, in the characteristic of the Japanese and Chinese alphabets. These alphabets consist of a very large number of characters, for example, 2,300 characters. The individual characters are quite complex. Both of these characteristics require that very large capacity memories be used for storing even a partial library of such characters.
The present invention effectively reduces the number of bits needed to be stored in order to display an individual character of good visual quality. By sufficiently reducing the number of bits needed to be stored in order to display an individual character without reducing display quality, it then becomes feasible to manufacture Japanese or Chinese language character generators that are performance and cost competitive with existing character generators.
Although this invention is being described in connection with the generation of characters for a complex Asian alphabet, it should be understood that it has equal application to European and English alphabets with the effect of producing higher speed, lower cost character generators.